you Okay. I see you guys are just like my church. You don't know when fellowship time is over. You want fellowship time to run into the service time. No, we're so thankful for the sessions that we've already had. We're thankful for that. We're thankful that we have many more sessions ahead of us. We have one more session, then we're going to have dinner, and then there'll be another session when we get back. So we still got a lot to take in. But before we sing and Worshipful Lord, I want to tell you a little bit about Grace Bible Theological Seminary. Grace Bible Theological Seminary is a seminary based out of our church, Grace Bible Church in Conway, Arkansas. Some of the distinctives about our seminary is that we're a church-based seminary, which in my mind is kind of the biblical model that the church is to take what has been given to it and teach to faithful men. And so we want to do that at GBTS. We want to do that in a way that we cannot just train men and give them a robust theological education, but that's the easy part of seminary. Being able to give doctrinal instructions is the easy part. You just have to lecture and give tests and require book reports. That's a needful part, that's an important part of education, but that's really about one-fourth of what it takes to train men. Training men is not an easy thing because more than just a robust theological education is needed to pastor, just to know the scriptures. Because being able to pastor doesn't take a formal education. It doesn't take a degree. It doesn't take some type of special diploma to make you qualified. In fact, that doesn't qualify you. You have to have a pastoral heart. You have to have a heart that serves. And that takes a church to evaluate man's gifts. Is he truly called of God? Does he have a passion to serve God's people? Does he have a love for the Word of God? Is he going to stand behind God's Word? And what we're looking for at GBTS is not just men that want to play. We're not looking for boys. We're looking for men. who believe the Bible is indeed the word of God and who will defend it at all cost and preach it and have a heart for God's people. And we want men that we train to be churchmen before their pastors. One of the requirements of all of our seminary students is that they're members of a church, and they're not just members, they're good members, active members. And if you can't, we tell our students, if you can't master being a church member, then you have no business to lead church members. And so we don't, at our seminary, we don't want to just give education. We want to see men and watch their lives and see their devotional lives and see how they develop in their character. And are they serving the church? Are they loving God's people? And the thing that we desire to do at our seminary that I think is somewhat unique is we don't want to give people an education, then give them a goodbye wave and hope all is well with them. Our goal is to take men that are called of God and gifted by the Lord and affirmed by the church. that have the skills to rightly divide the word of truth. We want to move them into ministry. We want to plant churches. We want to send out missionaries. We want to take the training as a means to a greater end. And the greater end is the Great Commission. The greater end is for the church to send out men either in pastoring churches or planting churches. And we want to do that from a reformed Baptist, conservative, and now I would even say non-woke perspective. And so if you want to know more about a conservative reformed Baptist seminary or what you can do if you're a student, you're interested in learning more about our program and what we offer, we invite you for a breakfast tomorrow morning at 830 at the seminary at 1076, 1076 Hark Rider at the seminary right middle. Oh, Come here, you know how to find this place. 830, 830. So if you want to register, if you have this in your bag, get your camera out, take a picture of this little square. It'll lead you to how to register to come. We ask you to be here. I'm gonna give a little more information about the seminary and what we're doing. If you want to, if you know someone that might be interested in theological education, we'd love for you to point them, but only if you believe they're a faithful man. We don't want a lot of applicants that we have to weed out. We want serious minded men that are called to a serious ministry. And if you want to know more about the seminary so that you might partner with us, we're learning that though this is a ministry of our local church, that the ministry is bigger than us. It's bigger than us and bigger than we can handle. So we could use partners, we could use those who'd come beside us, churches that would wanna come beside us and help support this work, be a part of this work, pray for this work. It's bigger than us. And so you can learn more about how to support financially through our website or learn if you wanna know, be a student. So we invite you to that breakfast in the morning. All right, we'll have Drew come up and lead us in a song. Let's go ahead and stand and sing holy, holy, holy. Holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty a song shall rise to thee. Holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty, God in three Blessed Trinity Holy, holy, holy All the saints adore Thee the grassy sea. Cherubim and seraphim, falling down before thee, wretched and burdened, evermore shall be. Holy, though the darkness hide thee, though the eye of sin command thy glory may not see, only thou art holy. There is none beside Thee perfect in power, in love and purity. Holy, holy, holy, All Thy work shall praise Thy name in earth and sky and sea. Holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty, God in three persons, blessed Trinity. You may be seated. Good afternoon. I am grateful for the opportunity to be here with you and consider the scriptures with everyone this afternoon. I have titled this sermon, this particular talk in light of social justice and the current climate in which we live, Creating with Clarity. creating with clarity. If you want to go ahead and open your Bibles to Genesis chapter one, we'll read from there momentarily. In a very real sense, we would have never predicted, we could have never predicted that we would be living in a society where the church at large is so consumed with secular ideologies. But it's where we find ourselves, unfortunately. In so many ways, I think we would have to agree that the recent events, the events over the past several months, the past few years, are a shocking development throughout evangelicalism. Yet, at the same time, I'm not sure why we would not have expected to be on the fast track to a post-Christian America, especially if we take an honest assessment, a gaze regarding the state of evangelicalism in recent decades, which actually includes my entire life. Surely we're willing to admit, and it's been stated already, this afternoon that the current state of our situation is not a result of some change that simply happened overnight. There has been a perfect storm of events over the past several months or couple of years to be certain. But where we find ourselves as the church in our country is not a result of one quick happening. We didn't go to bed one night in a righteous land and simply wake up in a nightmare. It feels that way at times, but it's simply not true. And I'll use a couple of other issues to hopefully shine some light on the actual state of Christianity in our culture over the past several years. The first one, Christians, in my notes, it's in quotes, have pretended to fight to keep prayer in school. Now, this is an old battle. This is like when I'm in school, when I was in school. But you remember these fights. Fighting to keep prayer in school while at the same time the average church is spending less than half an hour in prayer between all the weekly services combined. We would have been better off having prayer meetings praying that the schools would close rather than fighting to keep prayer in those anti-God bastions of unrighteousness. Second example, Christians were making such a big deal about keeping plaques of the Ten Commandments displayed in government buildings. Some of you will remember these battles that have happened. I'm not arguing that it's a bad battle. I'm not arguing that prayer shouldn't be in school. I'm pointing out that these public fights don't give a lot of evidence of what actually is going on within the church context. While Christians are fighting to keep the plaques of the Ten Commandments displayed at the government buildings, the law of God is the furthest thing from the life of the local church and from the professing church member in our culture. The spiritual climate that we find ourselves in today is a direct result of our disobedience. We have failed to be obedient to the scriptures. It's a completely wrong assumption if we think that the lack of flourishing in our churches or among Christianity today is because of how secular society has become, or how left the media is, or how outspoken liberals are. I'm in agreement, all of those things are true, but they're not the driving factor. The church failing to live godly in this present age has given way for these things. And not only that, we're too often guilty of following in their ways of wickedness. There was a time when the church fought to abstain from worldly wickedness and to lead the way in righteousness. in the culture, may God help us to be churches that once again fight for righteousness in every arena of life. But I fear that lately we have adopted the ways of the world. And in doing so, as the church, we have provided a pathway for our own utter demise. The present spiritual climate across our land is a direct result of our disobedience. How did we get here? From where did our watered-down effeminate evangelicalism come from? Genesis chapter 1. That's not where it came from. That's where I'm about to read. Let's read Genesis 1 beginning in verse 24 through the end of the chapter. Then God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle and creeping things and beasts of the air after their kind. And it was so. God made the beasts of the earth after their kind and the cattle after their kind and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him, male and female, he created them. God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth. Then God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed, it shall be food for you. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the sky, and to everything that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food, and it was so. God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day. How did we get here? One of the wide open pathways from which we have allowed these secular ideologies to infiltrate our churches is a failure to believe the Bible about actual differences between men and women, about distinctions of gender and specifics with regard to sexuality. It has opened the floodgates for an ungodly emphasis on differences in areas where God has created with equality. like race and ethnicity, and where he commands unity. And we continue to talk about diversity, which brings about division. There are differences that God has made, but it's in the area of gender, not in the area of race. God creates with clarity. Now, most worldviews would say that the world was created by chance, that it's kind of a self-creation. It created itself. The majority would suggest that the world and the things in it are basically good. Somehow we are ethically excusable, and we are destined for a happy eternity of blessed extinction. But not the word of God. Genesis 1 tells us that God created the world by design. And more specifically, that he created humanity to reflect his own image. Now, Genesis 1 is prior to the fall, prior to sin entering into humanity. After we sin, we are fundamentally flawed and we are morally culpable. And we are destined, therefore, as a result, for worship in heaven or wrath in hell. The first three days of creation brought about form through a series of separations that God caused, light from dark, the sky from the waters, dry land from the sea. And then the second set of three days, God fills the void that he has created by these separations, putting lights and creatures in the sky and the sea and then on land. which is day six that we just read about in Genesis 1. The final activity of this infamous week, the climax of all of God's creation, the crown jewel of his creative work. More space is given to the creation of human beings than anything else in the chapter. He mentions here on this sixth day the creation of animals. living creatures after their kind, and cattle, and creeping things, and beasts of the earth after their kind. He created three types of animals, three kinds, we might say. The domesticated, the insects, and reptiles, and wild animals, and all of these types, before we ruined the world with sin, all of these types and kinds of animals lived together peacefully and wonderfully. But that's not all that God created on the sixth day. He created us. Male and female, he created them. He created two types of genders. And prior to the fall, we lived together in perfect harmony, exactly the way God intended, as man and as woman. Then God said, verse 26, let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. Previously, God simply commanded, and it was. But now as he approaches his most excellent creation of man and woman, he doesn't command, but rather he consults with himself. a self-deliberating intra-divine decision is made on the part of God. It's a glimpse for us into the divine thought process. This is the way the prophet Isaiah describes it. Who has directed the spirit of the Lord or as his counselor has informed him? With whom did he consult and who gave him understanding and who taught him in the path of justice and taught him knowledge and informed him of the way of understanding? God didn't consult with anyone else, not angels, not anyone, not anything. Let us make man in our image. He stamped his image on human beings and human beings alone. And his stamp on us constitute a declaration of ownership. He made us for himself. He made men for himself. He made women for himself. Even Jesus taught about this idea of the stamp noting ownership when he said to the Pharisees, whose likeness and inscription is this? And they said to him, Caesar's. And Jesus said, then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. What do we owe God? We owe him our entire lives. We owe him worship and obedience and gratefulness. It's his likeness, his inscription that is on humanity. He can and therefore he does command whatever he wishes. He determines our maleness and our femaleness. He delineates our differences and he designs our distinctions and he does so for our good and for his own glory. Verse 27. God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them three times. The word create had only been used twice up until this point in verse 1 and 21, so fairly sparing. But something unique, something special is taking place here in verse 27. What I want to point out is the abundance of clarity in creation. Note the lack of obscurity in verse 27. God created man in his own image. It's clear as a bell. In the image of God, he created him. Crystal clear. Male and female, he created them. There's an abundance of clarity in creation if we hold to the perspicuity of Scripture. the simple clarity of what God has said. He has revealed it to us. And gender, whether or not you are a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, is an actual identity marker for God. We are all identified by God. We are image bearers of His. And gender, along with sexuality, are designed by God as distinctions for us to own. and to be comfortable in. Being male or being female or being heterosexual is not discriminatory, not in the least bit. God designed it that way. And then, verse 28, God blessed them. What was the blessing? The blessing was in the command. Be fruitful and multiply. fill the earth, subdue the earth. The kindness of God's character is revealed immediately. He creates man, He creates woman, and He blesses them. And in the blessing, He gives us not only a gift of one another, but a function and a responsibility, a role to play as we live out our calling unto God as image bearers belonging to him, either as men or women. Be fruitful and multiply. The psalmist said it this way, behold, children are a gift of the Lord. The fruit of the womb is a reward. In the same way that the blessing from God is a command from God, parenting comes with responsibility. It's a remarkable blessing, but it comes with a responsibility. It's a wonderful blessing that God has stamped his image on us, but it comes with a responsibility to live in accordance with his word and what he has said to us. God said to them, a personal relationship exists immediately. He created us. We belong to him. And then he gives us the mandate. Being made in his image is not just a matter of character and image, but also of activity and function and responsibility. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. It applies to all of life. Reproducing God's activity in creation, subduing and filling the earth is exactly what he did on the six days prior. So mankind, having now been created, On the sixth day is both in nature and over it. We've been given responsibility. He created us with dignity in his own image, according to his own likeness. He created us with dominion, commanding us to rule. and to exercise authority over. Not selfishly exploiting, but caring for, and looking after, and protecting, and providing. Now, exercising dominion is far more difficult because of the fall. Believe it or not, sin ruins everything. And we are still experiencing effects of it. He created us with dignity and with dominion, but also with distinction as male and female, different genders, distinct roles, and designed relationships. And he has given us a duty to be fruitful, multiply, to fill, and subdue, or succinctly replicating God's activity in creation. God saw all that he had made, verse 31, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. You may be familiar, but there was a second day, and a third day, and a fourth day, and a fifth day, but there's a definitive here. the sixth day when the crown of creation was created, the seventh day when God rested from his labors, establishing a pattern for us. God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good and absolute superlative. It could not have been better. when he made us male and female, when he created the different genders, the distinct roles and the designed relationship between the two different genders, there's no room for improvement. And any alteration to the way that God created is blasphemous. We're attempting to go back and erase and somehow say, no, it's not good. That God somehow made a mistake creating only two genders rather than, I don't know how many there are these days, I can't keep up, but two is an easy number to remember, so I'll stick with that. He made us with distinct clarity as men and women. And you know, the historical position of the church has recognized this distinction. The distinction of roles even between men and women, specifically regarding men holding positions of authority. God has called men to be an authority. He has given us that responsibility. But because of our culture's desire to have our ears tickled, we've produced a gender anarchy of sorts among evangelicalism in our day. I mean, there's some willingness at large to acknowledge God's distinction between men and women, but oftentimes it's only for the purpose of pursuing equity among them, which undermines the diversity that God has given. What we are doing is standing back over the word of God and picking and choosing where we want diversity to be displayed. This difference between men and women is ordained by God for the purpose of complementarity, not for indistinguishable uniformity. God's commands concerning these matters of men being men and women being women, it's not complex. It's not confusing. He created with clarity. Male and female, he created them. We have a hard time believing the simplicity of the word of God and what Tom just mentioned in the previous session exposes some of that. God's word is sufficient. But we live in a day, even when some would give a nod to the sufficiency of scripture, but then somehow want to claim that the Bible is nuanced. It's more nuanced than just the simplicity of he created them male and female. There's an argument that the Bible is far more nuanced on these issues than the church has historically recognized. The common claim is that the general theme of scripture concerning gender roles is actually absolute equality, specifically with regard to leadership responsibilities. They go a bit further and suggest that the texts of scripture that are used to prove, for example, that women should not hold authority in the church or in the home, that they've been historically misinterpreted. And actually now through recent so-called scholarship that they themselves have conveniently done for us, the true meaning of these texts has finally become clear and absolute equality or parity is what is intended rather than gender distinction. This nonsensical claim of nuance conveniently crosses over from gender roles to sexuality. to the point where we have Nate Collins, for example, the president and founder of Revoice, if you're not familiar with Revoice. They exist, I'm quoting, to support and encourage Christians who are sexual minorities so they can flourish in historic Christian traditions. There's so much wrong with that, it's hard to correct it, but I'm gonna try. Revoice exists to support and encourage confused religious people who are sexual deviants so that they can pretend that they're okay with God in their current culture. I say all that to point out that, listen to what Nate Collins said regarding sexuality and sexual sin. Christians have traditionally used terms like sin, temptation, and healing to answer these questions, all of which are found in various texts in scripture. My suspicion, however, is that we could provide more specific and potentially more meaningful answers to these questions if we broaden our search for descriptions of gay people's experience beyond terms explicitly found in scripture. That's screaming the insufficiency of scripture and how people think and how people feel actually matters. It almost never matters how we feel or how we think. What matters is what God has said in his word. The clarity of the biblical text has been and is being obscured by political ideological issues within our culture. Our church culture. The reformed church subculture. We're not immune to this garbage. The doctrine of the perspicuity of scripture no longer seems to apply to the most basic areas of the scriptures teaching. God made them male and female. And somehow we've gotten that all obscured and confused in our minds. The Bible speaks so plainly on this issue. God created Adam and Eve in his own image, revealing their essential equality in bearing his image, essential equality. And the biblical order of creation establishes for us timeless principles for the relationships between men and women. Adam was created first, and then Eve. In Adam, we all died. Has anyone ever read in scripture, in Eve, all died? Nowhere in scripture does it lay the blame for the fall, original sin, at Eve's door. It was Adam, not Eve, who was required to explain to God the alienation, despite Eve having been the one who was deceived and the first one to sin and the one who enticed her husband to follow her into that sin. This is not a small or an unimportant aspect of the biblical account recorded for us in Genesis 3. It was Adam. whom God first held responsible for the original sin of the fall, even though Adam was the second sinner in the garden. It's because of the sin of Adam, not Eve, that the race of Adam remains fallen and under the curse of judgment and death, even to this present day. I hope you don't hear me throwing Eve under the bus for sinning first. I'm throwing Adam under the bus and all of us with him because we sinned in Adam. But we would never consider holding Eve responsible as the leader in the garden. Should she have not been penalized more severely since it was her that led in the first sin, took the lead in the first sin? Is it not patronizing to attribute the cosmic punishment of the fall to Adam? No, it's not. No, we shouldn't accuse her. No, she should not have been penalized more. No, it's not patronizing to attribute it all to Adam. It is via Adam alone that death comes to all men. How can we say that so confidently? Because the New Testament tells us. It's because of Adam's sin that all creation groans, awaiting its release from the corruption of sin. And it's also in Adam that we all die. Every woman or man ever to live has been born under this curse, the curse of a God-decreed solidarity with the first Adam, our federal head. And only those who come under the head of the last Adam, that is Christ, can be saved. What a glorious truth that man, woman, boy or girl, though you are born in sin, you therefore are sin and you do sin. That Christ came to save sinners. Whether man or woman, you're a sinner, and therefore you qualify for the immeasurable grace that is provided in the gospel. The order of creation, first Adam and then Eve, is as timeless in its principles as it is in its application. Scripture continues to demonstrate this again and again, that the principles of these first few chapters in Genesis serve as timeless boundaries for all of humanity, even for us today. And we see it in the Apostle Paul when he writes that women may not teach or exercise authority over men. He argues it from the text. He believed that the word of God was sufficient and clear. Paul explicitly affirms what is implicit time and again throughout the scriptures, that the order of creation establishes the role of leadership. or father rule or patriarchy as God's pattern for leadership in human relationships. The reputation of God is at stake with our obedience to his commands. His commands toward us are good. The law of the Lord is perfect. His commands toward women are not discriminatory. They're not negative. Consider in Titus 2, God's perfect yes, his loving yes to women. Older women, likewise, are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips, nor enslaved to whine. Does that sound like bondage? This is freedom. teaching what is good so they may encourage the young women to love their husbands and love their children, to be sensible and pure, and workers at home and kind, being subject to their own husbands so that the word of God will not be dishonored. The reputation of God is at stake with our obedience to his commands. Differentiation. that God has established between gender, roles, and responsibilities. Is it a part of God's good creation? God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. All that he had made, men and women, and it was very good. This aspect of the scriptures is most certainly not lacking in clarity. There's nothing confusing Even if you're reading from a different translation, I'm guessing it has not been botched. It's clear. Now, everything about it wasn't good to the same degree. Look over with me to chapter two, verse 18. Chapter two provides a closer look at the passage that we read in chapter one You can see a little bit more of the details playing out. So after the Lord had created Adam and commanded him, saying, from any tree of the garden you may freely eat, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die. Then the Lord God said, chapter two, verse 18, it is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. It is not good. What's not good about it? Because humanity is incomplete without woman. Mankind is incomplete without woman. God created Adam and he created Eve. He recognized, not because he learned anything, this concept is there for our own benefit, that it wasn't good for Adam to be alone. So he created him in helper. Too often I think we're offended by this word helper, but it's not a demeaning concept at all. It doesn't mean second rate. There's no sense of inferiority here. The same word used here for a woman helping a man in the context of marriage is used in Exodus 18.4, the God of my father was my help and delivered me from the sword of Pharaoh. It's that kind of help. The Lord was my help. The Lord provided what man needed in woman. A helper suitable for him. It was fit perfectly for him. a corresponding opposite, so essentially equal as image bearers, but a corresponding complementary opposite. What man lacked, what was not good in him, woman supplied. What was not good was made up for, therefore made good by woman. Aloneness in the garden was remedied by God with corresponding complementing companionship. Nothing's going to remedy our aloneness apart from that. Marriage is what God designed in the beginning between a man and a woman. Now, this need that Adam had, this lack, it wasn't good for him to be alone. It's not a result of sin. The garden was an absolutely perfect environment. Sin had not entered in. was experiencing the unbroken presence of God. So not being good had nothing to do with sin. Rather, Adam was actually created with the need of a corresponding relationship. Eve was no afterthought. God intended to make men and women from the beginning. In verse 21 of chapter 2 tells us how it happened. God took one of Adam's ribs and closed up the flesh in that place. Not really a rib, but something from his side. The important thing to note is not what was used as much as to note that God is as personally involved in creating woman as he was man. That is, God made them both distinct and different. But the differences are complementary and matching rather than rivalry. That creeps its ugly head in post-fall as part of the judgment. They're created relative with relative or relational distinctions yet with essential equality. Woman does not. I mentioned this already, woman does not occupy an inferior position, but fully assists her husband in fulfilling the divine cultural mandate to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule. You know what? Man can't do that by himself. Woman cannot do that by herself. Men and women are fundamentally one in human nature, stamped with the image of God, yet with a clear distinction between their genders. We don't make ourselves male or female any more than we make ourselves human. God determines our gender and our sexuality. The image of God that we are stamped with as individuals is uniquely connected to our being either male or female. Bearing his image requires distinct masculinity for men. Bearing the image of God requires distinct femininity for women. And rejecting it in any way whatsoever is a rejection of God, of his word, of his will, and of his rights over us, the one who made us. His inscription is on us. We are owned by him. Gender clarity and therefore biblical sexual relations are essential, absolutely essential to healthy human identity, as well as our Christian witness for God who made us. We cannot accurately represent him if we aren't living in accordance with his will. If men aren't living like men and women aren't living like women, we are dishonoring God and misrepresenting him in society. He made us for specific roles in society to have certain relationships with the opposite gender, namely marriage. And he provides restrictions to both these roles and relationships in his word. for men and women. Christian women should cultivate wholesome, natural, godly femininity. Christian men should cultivate wholesome, natural, godly masculinity. Again, I mentioned in opening, this place, the clear creation of God, provides such precise clarity. And yet we find ourselves in a culture that cannot seem to figure out who is a boy or a girl or a man or a woman. And yet in the scriptures, God has made this clear lack of distinction between so-called races, and we can't seem to get past a constant pursuit of diversified division. How did we get here? Chapter 3 of Genesis explains it all. God created and everything was good, very good, yet we sinned, we rebelled, we chose self over God. How good it looked, the desire that I had, how I wanted it to make me feel, what I thought I could learn. How do we move forward? Redemption through the gospel of Jesus Christ. All of us are in Adam with our sin stained separations from God, bearers of the image of God made in his likeness but born separated from him because of our sin but our identity doesn't have to remain only in Adam. If we respond in repentance and faith, our identity is in Christ. There's transformation that happens. There's real unity that can exist between us and the God who made us. We had the wonderful opportunity of being a man indwelled by the Holy Spirit, or a woman indwelled by the Holy Spirit, or a boy or a girl indwelled by the Holy Spirit of God. In a similar fashion, the way that creation, we're all created by God, stamped with his image, levels the playing field, the cross of Christ even more so. Our identity is in Christ. Our hope is in Him to be men and women and boys and girls who are made in the image and likeness of God, yes, who are the crowning culmination of God's creation, yes, but who are striving after godliness as men and Christ-likeness as women, because we recognize that apart from him, we can do nothing. Apart from him, we are nothing. And we continue to fall prey to the sin that is so rampant around us. And it creeps up within us as the old man exercises what's left of him as we continue mortifying those deeds of the flesh. May God help us to not give way to the pressure from without and the growing pressures from within our churches, to obscure the simple clarity or the perpiscuity of God's word. He made us, stamping us with his own image, male and female, he created them. Let's pray. Our Lord and our God we thank you for your word. How you have preserved it for us, provided it for us, placed it in our hands, convinced us of its truth. God we pray that the truths as they are in Jesus would sink down into our hearts affecting every aspect of our lives that we might be men and women. who live our whole lives completely unto you, based on the truth of your word. In Christ's name we pray, amen. That was Anthony Mathenia. I have one job, I failed. Anthony, let me tell you a little bit about him and we'll break for dinner. You heard a man of God there. Anthony has many hats. He oversees a right for life where they seek to save little babies that are about to be aborted. And through his ministry, there's been multiple children who have been rescued. And so he oversees that. He also is on the board of HeartCry Missionary Society, where they support missionaries around the world. One of the best missionary agencies that I know of, doing a lot of good work, and Anthony's involved in that. He's also a pastor at Christ Church, Radford, Virginia, right? And he's one of these friends that I have developed that, you know, we're about the same age and so that I identify with him in that, that we're out at the same time in our ministries. But he's one of these guys that I... When I need someone to talk to or need a question, I know that Anthony's on that short list of men that I want to call to get counsel from, advice from. So you just heard from him. What a great message that he's brought to us. We have a two-hour break. So you have two hours to either find something in Valonia to eat, or you can have time to travel to Conway. Did you hear that? A taco food truck in the parking lot right here at your doorsteps. Don't forget to visit the booths in the fellowship hall and be back in two hours. We have two more sessions this evening.